Finding good images to illustrate climate change is hard. First up, the topic has so many abstract concepts – computer models, uncertain climate impacts, future scenarios.

What image perfectly and pithily illustrates uncertainty in climate projections, for example?

Secondly, there are some pictures which have been used to much that they have become rather devalued. Not worth a thousand words, certainly. Maybe just four: “Oh dear, not again.”

Finally, there are images which get used because they push people’s buttons, but don’t really help unpack the topic. Polar bears on ice, burning planets – they’re cliches, that you can’t rely on to inform and explain.

So seeing as it’s Friday, here are 9 climate change images I probably don’t need to see again:

(Probably a stock photo.)

Climate change will probably cause droughts that will affect people in hats. Yep, got that.

London: Underwater. The thing about sea level rise is, no matter how cathartic it might be to see the government under water, the UK is basically rich enough to make sure this doesn’t happen.

Images which show something familiar transformed do rather suggest that its is something you might wake up one morning and actually see, rather than (hopefully) a bad scenario in a future that is beyond our lifetimes.

Probably a stock photo – (yes, it’s backwards) – it has spread across the internet like a weed.

I’m not sure why I don’t like this widely used image, but I think it might be that it’s too subtle.

What is it saying? Something about the planet being on fire? And also held in the palm of your hand? Perhaps if you’re holding the planet in the palm of your hand, and it’s on fire, you should drop it? Or put it in some water? Maybe the point is that it’s your responsibility to stop the planet burning? Oh, I don’t know.

Communicating the fact that climate change will be disruptive to human society while not overplaying the science is hard. What to do? Focus on specific, easy to remember facts. Like, as successive IPCC reports haven’t shown, climate change will turn you into a fish wearing a terrible shirt. Oh dear WWF Belgium.

More of a category this, and a crime we’re almost certainly guilty of on occasion – the impenetrable diagram. What does it show? No-one reading knows. Where is it explained? It isn’t. Why should you care? You probably shouldn’t.

Well, perhaps it’s just too tricky to communicate about complicated subjects like climate change using crude images. To really get the message across, perhaps a richer, more subtle medium is necessary?

Barry Chernoff, a professor of environmental studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, is teaching his students to boogie their climate cares away with his interpretive dance class, “Feet to the Fire: The Art and Science of Global Warming.”